Buckminster
Fuller: Illusive Mutant Artist

Victoria
Vesna

Impossible
to Categorize, the Anticipatory Design Scientist
Foreshadows the Complex Persona of a Contemporary Media Artist

Typically one may look to movements and specific personalities embodying certain
characteristics to set the stage for the emergence of the new. In terms of
movements foreshadowing the issues surrounding art and technology on the Net-copyright,
identity, gender, space, and so on-one might consider performance, happenings,
and conceptual art of the 60's. When searching for a prescient historical
personality prefiguring the digital age to come, what better example than
Buckminster Fuller. Much ignored by the generation of artists who may profit
most by being acquainted with his vision, Fuller, with his carefully constructed
persona of Anticipatory Design Scientist, heralded the coming age of artists
who work in tandem with scientists and toward innovation and discovery of
the aesthetic of the invisible realm.

It is important to stress that Fuller was
at once a philosopher and a practitioner - a necessary mix for contemporary
artists, no matter what the media of choice. For anyone working with volatile
technology, being able to ground oneself historically and articulate the work
that evolves in the midst of chaos is simply mandatory for survival. Definitions
of Buckminster Fuller are as myriad as the fields he traversed. On different
occasions he was referred to as an architect, inventor, scientist, engineer,
mathematician, educator, philosopher, poet, speaker, author, consultant, economist,
futurist, transcendentalist, and designer, and the list goes on. His visionary,
magnetic personality had an inspirational, and in some cases catalytic, effect
on many influential people in various disciplines. Each field had something
to learn from his comprehensive outlook, yet no one field completely embraced
him, including art or architecture.

Strongly influenced by
his great aunt Margaret Fuller, a leader in theosophical society, he considered
the machine inseparable from the spiritual principle operating in the universe.
Margaret Fuller's transcendentalism was an inspirational force through his
lifetime, as was Albert Einstein's theory of relativity and Henry Ford's introduction
of automation into the workplace. This triangle of spiritualism, science,
sculpture and mechanization is ever-present in his work, and it is reappearing
in the emerging field of the digital arts. Fuller influenced and inspired
many artists who went on to revolutionize and redefine the idea of art and
his complex relation of links to interests, activities and people could easily
be likened to one of his geodesic structures consisting of a seemingly endless
number of triangular links. One particular triangle of connections is that
of Fuller to the artist and composer John Cage, the media theorist Marshall
McLuhan, and the scientist Albert Einstein.

For artists working with networks, it is
the performance aspect of Fuller's work that is most compelling. He made his
life a performance and left behind an enormous amount of data documenting this
effort. A modern-day shaman who expressed his ideas in disorganized fragments
and marathon lectures, he was magnetic, mesmerizing, and inspiring to those
he made contact with, even if they did not understand what he was saying. Delivering
more than 2,000 lectures at 500 universities and colleges and making 48 trips
around the world, he was a tireless performer. Famous for his non-stop "talkathons,"
he put his ideas to the test in architectural forms, eighteen books, and, toward
the end of his career, in World Games which engage global problems through gaming.
Buckminster Fuller was the ultimate net- worker-physically moving from place
to place, making connections igniting inspiration everywhere he went.

In 1928, Isamu Noguchi
planned to do a sculpture portrait of Fuller who suggested that he use the
chrome, nickel, and steel alloy that Henry Ford had just used on the radiator
grilles of the Model A car. Noguchi wanted to challenge the accepted method
of using negative light (shadows) to produce definition, and the chrome, nickel,
and steel alloy allowed him to experiment with this notion and create a surface
that was absolutely reflective. It remains an early example of the use of
industrial materials in art.

Fuller referred to Noguchi
as a scientist-artist, pointing out that Noguchi "learned that in the Orient
there was historically no general concept of 'sculptor' as we know it." Their
collaborative relationship continued for years In 1934, Fuller asked Noguchi
to make the small-scale plaster models for his Dymaxion Car, and in 1936 Noguchi,
inspired like Fuller by Einstein's theory of relativity, worked on his first
major public sculpture in Mexico. It was a seventy-two-foot-long wall, part
of which would be a figure of an Indian boy observing Einstein's equation
for energy. Noguchi forgot the exact equation and wired to Fuller for help.
Fuller sent back a telegram explaining E=mc2; in precisely fifty words. Soon
after, on the cover of the November 1932 issue of his magazine Shelter, Fuller
published a photograph of a Nogochi sculpture to which he later gave the name
"Miss Expanding Universe." Elements of Fuller's tensegrity spheres and icosahedrons
can be found in the tensile web of at least one of Noguchi's public monuments.
Noguchi is just one of the many artists who were influenced by and had a relationship
with Fuller.

Although embraced and
befriended by revolutionary artists of his time, Fuller was never able to
define himself as one of them. His complexity, mobility, and use of various
technologies alluded to and attracted many fields, putting him in the position
to be the predecessor of a complex persona that was yet to emerge. Although
he refrained from calling himself an artist, perhaps because of the constraints
of the time he lived in, his definitions of artists are probably much closer
to describing himself than any of the definitions he readily acknowledged.
And although he used the word "artist," when he referred to painters, sculptors
and dancers, he proclaimed that one day Henry Ford and Albert Einstein would
be recognized as the greatest artists of our time. As a practitioner, he was
most inspired by those who were able to change society with their work, and
his life was a devoted effort to do the same. Einstein was a major influence
and inspirational figure in Fuller's life. Fuller's book Nine Chains to the
Moon is largely driven by ideas arrived at by analyzing Einstein's theory
of relativity through his prism. The chapters in the book that specifically
referenced Einstein were initially turned down by the publishers, who felt
that Fuller did not have the appropriate background to comment on physics.
But this did not stop Fuller, who wrote to Einstein, and sent him the manuscript.
Subsequently, the two men met, and Einstein approved of the text, commenting
that he was delighted by Fuller's interpretation of the theory of relativity.

Fuller once referred to Einstein by quoting
Emerson, one of his great-aunt's contemporaries. "Ralph Waldo Emerson defined
poetry," said Fuller, "as 'saying the most important things in the simplest
way.'" By that definition Einstein may have been history's greatest poet-for
who could say so much as simply as Einstein did when he described the physical
universe as E=mc2?' But by calling Einstein the greatest poet and artist of
our time, Fuller created an oppositionally defined space between science and
art, which he occupied for the rest of his life. In this way he preceded a generation
of artists who seek to form a bridge between the arts and sciences.

"The great scientists
and great artists are not only subjective and pure but also objective and
responsible inventors," Fuller said. He felt that artists had a unique position
because of their comprehensive training which frequently gave the artists
a broader viewpoint: "I feel that it is the artists who keep the integrity
of childhood alive until we reach the bridge between the arts and sciences."
He felt that the broad outlook artists are privy to is their strength: "Artists
haven't painted themselves into the special corner. Because of a comprehensive
outlook, their art reflects the many disciplines, especially science," he
wrote "The only ones who don't get trained for specialization are artists,
they want to be whole." [2]

Fuller often stressed
the importance of blurring the artist's and scientist's roles. He felt that
the artist often created patterns through her imagination that the scientist
later saw in nature. But at the core, Fuller's vision was that these two opposite
sides of the cultural pendulum's swing would eventually come together.

Fuller was perfectly
aware that this was not an entirely new thought, as he himself quoted Leonardo
da Vinci, who he called a "painter, sculptor, architect, engineer and inventor
of the wheelbarrow, and other useful instruments from the speaking tube to
the mechanically gyp-proof whore-house," and who wrote: "the further art advances
the closer it approaches science, the further science advances the closer
it approaches art." [3]

In many ways Fuller was rooted in centrality, universality and Cartesan principles
that seemed to contradict his visions. Because he is impossible to classify,
it is all too easy to focus on one aspect of his character and dismiss the entire
complex persona. This is unfortunate, as it is precisely the contradictions
that makes his work so important today. The problem of how one may navigate
contradiction and complexity is central for those working in art and technology.
Fuller provides a model that points to integrity as being key in the work one
builds while on this Spaceship Earth. Although he professed a lack of interest
in how his projects looked, he believed that a project at completion was beautiful
if it possessed integrity, which to him was the key to aesthetics. Integrity
is a crucial word in redefining art according to Fuller - integrity of individual
communication independent of the medium of its articulation.

The great aesthetic which
will inaugurate the twenty-first century will be the utterly invisible quality
of intellectual integrity; the integrity of the individual dealing with his
scientific discoveries; the integrity of the individual in dealing with conceptual
realization of comprehensive interrelatedness of all events; the integrity
of the individual dealing with the only experimentally arrived at information
regarding invisible phenomena; and finally integrity of all those who formulate
invisibly within their respective minds and invisibly with the only mathematically
dimensionable, advanced technologies, on the behalf of their fellow men.

- Buckminster Fuller,
1973

John Cage, America's foremost avant garde composer, became enamored of Fuller
during the first summer Cage spent at Black Mountain College, and his admiration
grew over the years. That summer at Black Mountain, Cage mentioned Fuller
in his infamous "Defense of Satie" lecture in which he laid the groundwork
for his artistic position. Two years later, in the "Lecture on Something,"
Cage again cites Fuller, stating, "As Bucky Fuller is fond of pointing out:
the movement of the wind of the Orient and the movement against the wind of
the Occident meet in America and produce a movement upwards into the air—the
space, the silence, the nothingness that supports us " [4]
Richard Kostelanetz, a biographer of Cage, notes that Cage refused to acknowledge
the "totalitarian tendencies" in Fuller's thinking. [5]
The point Kostelanetz misses is the power and inspirational force of Fuller's
persona. Although Cage's exploration of space differs from Fuller's, in his
embracing chance and unpredictability he is initially inspired by Fuller's
more uniform and idealistic abstract space. As Reinhold Martin notes, it is
ironic that the very concept of "eermentation" that Cage linked to Fuller's
image of airborne movement is what most clearly distinguished his outlook
from Fuller's.

Cage, with his open-ended, conceptually driven performances was influential
and liberating to visual artists wanting to break out of the wall and frame.
He rejected dualistic thinking, and through his work explored the multiplicitous
realms of chance and indeterminacy. Fuller and Cage's connection to each other
was based on their deep appreciation of something beyond thought-intuition,
unmediated insight, intelligence-experience that can be accessed only through
silence.

Both men were rooted spiritually yet worked in the material realm and considered
the condition of the world. Cage was conceptually able to go beyond Fuller's
utopian prophesying, by introducing chance and random possibilities into his
work, but it is significant that Fuller consistently acted as an inspirational
force for Cage throughout his creative life. His last public reading, in 1992,
the year he died, was a piece entitled "Overpopulation and Art." In this final
message, he clearly points to the importance of re-examining Fuller's ideas:
"Fuller is dead but his spirit is now more than ever the spirit the world
needs, it is alive, we have it in his work, his writings... Let us not forget
we are having to continue his work, in music the absence of the conductor's
score and barline, spaceship earth." [6]

In the 60s and 70s McLuhan and Fuller were frequently cited together But after
Fuller's death, he was often ignored in favor of McLuhan. This is particularly
true of the digital-arts community that started emerging shortly after Fuller's
passing. Fuller's ideas-broad, comprehensive, and complex-were never easy
to digest and were closely linked to his magnetic personality. Thus, once
his physical presence ceased to exist, so did the public engagement with the
complex web of his ideas. Many have been transfixed by Fuller's presence and
have fed off his energy Many took just a few concepts out of the stream of
consciousness that flowed relentlessly out of him, distilled them, and brought
them back in a form easier to digest, without crediting the source.

In a chapter entitled "The Prophets: Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan,"
Peter Drucker in his book Adventures of a Bystander, makes a keen comparison
of the two men, whom he knew from 1940, before they became celebrities. He
first met Fuller at Fortune while he was working as a "technical consultant,"
hired by Henry Luce. At one point Luce told Drucker that he didn't know what
Fuller was up to, and didn't understand a word he said, but thought he was
a good performer and was willing to bet on him. Drucker describes Fuller's
talks as "happenings" with no time limit. McLuhan, on the other hand, had
a very straight, clear, and academic delivery In many ways, the two men could
not have been more different. Drucker notes the primary contrast between them,
as it appeared in their approach to technology: "Bucky is a transcendentalist,
very conscious of the legacy of his great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, the last
of the New England transcendentalists of the nineteenth century. Bucky's world
is pantheist, man approaches his divinity the more he identifies with universal
technology. Marshall McLuhan sees technology as human rather than divine.
Technology is the extension of man." [7] But there is some evidence that this
idea of the extension of man, identified by many as the core concept of McLuhan's
philosophical stance, may have come from the transcendentalist Bucky. From
1960 to 1970, Constantin Dioxides, an engineer, architect, and urban planner
and the founder of the Athens Technological Institute in Greece, organized
summer cruises complete with cutting edge guests such as Margaret Mead, and
Jonas Salk. Many, including McLuhan, were guests more than once, but only
Fuller was invited on every single trip for twelve years in a row. In The
Synergetics Dictionary, under McLuhan, notes such as these were made by Fuller:
"Marshall McLuhan told me the first day he met me-on one of the early Dioxide
cruises-'I am your disciple.' He held up copies of No More Secondhand God
and Nine Chains to the Moon and said to me 'I've joined your conspiracy!"'
In his notes, he writes: "McLuhan has never made any bones about his indebtedness
to me as the original source of most of his ideas. The 'Global Village' was
indeed my concept. I don't think he has an original idea. Not one McLuhan
says so himself. He's really a great enthusiast, a marvelous populariser and
teacher. He has an irrepressible sense of the histrionic, like no one I've
known since Frank Lloyd Wright." Indeed, in Nine Chains to the Moon, a passage
reads: "Through the leverage gained by his inanimate instrument extensions
of self, he has attained an extended mechanical ability far in excess of his
own integral mechanical energy content ability." [8]
He goes on to claim that the idea of "man backing up into his future" appears
in his books and that Fuller's concept of the "Mechanical Extensions of Man"
is the basis for McLuhan's talk of the "Electrical Extensions" of man. [9]
Ironically, even though resentment for not being acknowledged shows through
in these notes, Fuller wrote a glowing letter of support for McLuhan's application
to the Canada Council for a grant to write an inventory of all breakthroughs
in arts and sciences since 1900. In the letter, he enthusiastically supports
McLuhan's project, overriding his personal feelings in realization that the
most important thing is to have the ideas live on.

Fuller, as someone who channeled an endless stream of information and ideas,
inspired many He was at once slightly contemptuous of and impressed by the
creative abilities of people such as McLuhan and Frank Lloyd Wright to absorb
newfound ideas and re-create them as their own. Very early on, in his Nine
Chains to the Moon treatise, he qualifies genius and talent: "The function
of genius is to provide new instruments, and to process-means for the progressive
growth of man; talent's function is the precise and harmonious popularization
of the otherwise undetectable, and, therefore, otherwise non-useful products
of genius. What is often mistermed as plagiarism is more precisely 'talent.'
'Plagiarism' is an ethical off-shoot label of the false property illusion
described in our phantom captain chapter." Unfortunately, Fuller ran into the same
self-contradictory problem faced by artists working with digital media. On
the one hand, it is wonderful that work can be endlessly reproduced and the
idea memetically spread. On the other, the ego finds it hard to come to terms
with the sacrificed identification mark on the idea manifest.

As noted earlier, Fuller very early on recognized the computer as a human
extension, never losing the organic quality in his interpretation of the human/machine
relationship. He describes man as a machine driven by the "Phantom Captain,"
without whose guidance the "human" mechanisms are reduced to imbecile contraptions.
The Phantom Captain is likened to a variant of a polarity dominance in our
bipolar electric world, which, "when balanced as a unit, vanishes as abstract
unity I or O." With the Phantom Captain's departure, the mechanism becomes
inoperative and very quickly disintegrates into basic chemical elements. Margaret
Fuller's influence can be felt when reading Fuller's interpretation of the
human/machine extensions-it is psychical. At the end of his life, Fuller reasserted
this idea: "The new human networks' emergence represents the natural evolutionary
expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its-building, world embracing,
psychical communication network."

Fuller, first and foremost a performance artist who constructed practical
prototypes of some of his visions, was convinced that even the most fantastic
scenarios were possible. He thought he could manifest utopia. He left behind
a wealth of information for us to look through, leaving it up to each individual
or group to decide how to categorize it. How does this help define the complex
persona we refer to as a media artist? Just ask yourself if there exists,
in all the complexity of a work you are considering, the invisible aesthetic
of integrity.

1.The author greatfully
acknowledges the director of BFI, Allegra Fuller-Snyder for her support and
generosity.
2. This essay is an excerpt of a larger research project considering the relevance
of Buckminster Fuller's work in relation to art and commerce in networked
space.

Victoria Vesna
is an artist, writer, and educator at University of Calilfornia, Santa Barbara.